Electronic music nerds: Wednesday night was Green Galactic's ten year anniversary show at the Silent Movie Theater. GG's founder, Lynn Hasty, ought to be proud. She's been a cornerstone of LA's electronic music scene, bringing pioneering nights such as Public Space to us for a decade, including some of the early ISDN linkups of FSOL directly from London. I can't remember the name of the place anymore, but there was one in Santa Monica at this kind of proto-internet cafe; this would have been around 1994 I think. Memory is foggy.

Through the rise and fall of the rave scene, super clubs, and various and sundry other fine and regrettable moments in the last ten years of electronic music, she's remained steadfast in providing outlets for music that confounds easy categorization. Even as chillout rooms were in decline, she promoted nights that emphasized more thoughtful or challenging music, and many of her nights often felt like oases of true music in an increasingly banal desert of monotonous dancefloor fodder. She continues promoting today, via her current weekly Twine.

GG is actually more of a publicity company than a promoter, but it's all part of Lynn's universe and LA's music world is better off for it.

The headliners for the party were Germany's Pole, and I'm Not a Gun, which is John Tejada's and Takeshi Nishimoto's live ensemble. Both were suitable choices for the anniversary. The venue was neat, my only complaint being that the seating arrangement made it feel a bit more like you were at a recital and less at a show or party. John and Takeshi played six tracks, employing some sequenced bass and sound effects with Takeshi's delicate, textural guitar, and John's fractured rock drumming. Their work falls into the unfortunately named Post-rock genre, but if you know what that is, that's where it's at. The music is quite pretty, and very textural. If you could write a song for guitar, bass, and drums, and then somehow blur it like that funny tool in Photoshop does, that might give you some idea of how they sounded. They built to a fine crescendo with an excellent closing track.

Pole's set was as his records are: minimal, pulsing dub; as far distilled as dub can possibly be while still retaining some semblance of form; before it would otherwise disintegrate into disconnected raw components of sound. Little ticks and whirring sounds and clicks and buzzes flickered around the low throb of bass, with brittle, semi-harmonic chord stabs leaping into the foreground and then echoing off into blank space.

Pole's music is almost as much about the space around the sounds as it is the sounds themselves. And that creates a small problem for live performance: it's so static and ambient that I'm not sure that live performance--with an audience in a room--is the most appropriate environment for it. I couldn't help but think of earlier ambient music by people such as Brian Eno and the explicit intention attached to it: ambience. I was even thinking of some of the early twentieth century experiments in Furniture Music by Eric Satie whereby music and sound were organized in a way to create what was, in essence ambient, or environmental music. The music was specifically intended to be placed in the context of a physical environment and consumed as part of that environment, not foregrounded as a primary source.

While few would call Pole Ambient Music, his music is thoroughly environmental. It's the kind of thing I want to hear in connection with something else; an installation, a place...a context of some physical sort that doesn't promote the relationship of audience/performer. His work is almost more akin to sonic sculpture than music, and as such, I'd almost rather walk through it or be surrounded by it than sit and listen with a directed gaze at someone making it. A friend I was sitting with said half way through that she wanted to be lying down, or sitting in her living room with friends or something like that. Sitting in theater chairs watching it felt like I was fighting against the nature of the music.

Anyway, more confirmation of my small theory that quite a bit of electronic music really isn't meant for live performance, and that attempts to re-organize it around the idea of performance are ultimately futile. The very essence and theory of a lot of this music is counter-performative. It's music that's absolute studio artifice. Indeed, it often finds its greatest strengths in the fact that it can't really be performed; that is, manually played.

That lengthy and pompous digression aside, congratulations to Lynn Hasty and Green Galactic and a hearty thank you for the uncompromising position they've maintained over the years. We are richer for their work.